Re: Moving to two year terms for board elections

[Tobias Mueller <muelli cryptobitch de>]

Hi Neil.

On Thu, 2019-02-07 at 18:36 +0000, Neil McGovern wrote:
> The act of simply deciding to re-run is a risk and contains an amount
> of work itself. As someone who has run for election offline, and been
> elected, and then lost my seat when re-standing, it shouldn't be
> underestimated the emotional impact that even the possibility of
> losing an election can have.
Absolutely. And I'd say that this proves my point. In that case the
electorate seems to think differently, i.e. that it's better to exchange
the candidate rather than letting the candidate be in power.

I have the feeling, though, that this is not an issue in practice. I
haven't run an analysis, but my gut feeling says that people who wanted
to be re-elected were more often re-elected than not.

>  This is a consideration of people when they
> decide not to re-run, but would otherwise be happy to continue in the
> role.

Yes, of course. Re-running incurs some cost. Those need to be balanced
against the sovereignty of the electorate.  As in, it'd be super
convenient for the Board to not have elections at all and pick new
directors at their discretion. But that'd remove all the power from
the electorate.  As such, any increase of the length of the term can be
seen as an attack on the sovereignty of the electorate and the intention
should be justified.

A two year term is what the current bylaws define as the upper limit:
https://people.gnome.org/~tobiasmue/bylaws2012/bylaws.html#election-and-term-of-office-of-directors
So if the board wants two year terms, then it's as easy as calling for a
two year term for the next election.


> The use of longer than one year terms (and staggering them) is
> considered good governance in general however, due to the
> "institutional memory" that can be provided for this.
I appreciate that argument. Conversely, though, staggered terms also
makes old habits stick with absolutely no way out.  Having synchronous
terms provides a strict superset of the staggered terms, because they
enable the electorate decide how they want the new Board to be shaped,
i.e. whether they want to remove a cabal that has been formed or keep
things as they are.
That may or may not have been the reason for the bylaws to not allow for
staggered terms.
If the board wants staggered terms, I see a need for new bylaws. It's
surprisingly easy to achieve, though, cf. 
https://people.gnome.org/~tobiasmue/bylaws2012/bylaws.html#amendments.


Cheers,
  Tobi